Doctors land decisive blow to wipe out polio in northern India

A child in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, is given polio vaccine. The last case in the state was recorded more than a year ago

It will be cold comfort, but it may well be that Subham Singh grows up in the knowledge that he was one of the last children in India to contract polio.

The two-year-old boy buries his head in his mother’s sari but at her encouragement staggers, his hips swinging widely, across the family’s courtyard in the village of Haryana, near Moradabad, in Uttar Pradesh. She says he is a happy child, but there is no mistaking the mark left by the disease.

Chhoti Singh produces her son’s immunisation card, which someone has torn in two — as well they might, since it shows that he received three doses of polio vaccine before he contracted the disease. It is thought that at least five doses of the…